WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said their dinner with President Trump this evening yielded an agreement to protect 800,000 DREAMers without bringing the border wall into the deal.
“We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the president. The discussion focused on DACA. We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.
“We also urged the president to make permanent the cost-sharing reduction payments, and those discussions will continue,” they added of Obamacare.
A White House official said on background that Trump “had a constructive working dinner” with the two Dem leaders “as well as administration officials to discuss policy and legislative priorities.”
“These topics included tax reform, border security, DACA, infrastructure and trade,” the official said. “This is a positive step toward the president’s strong commitment to bipartisan solutions for the issues most important to all Americans. The administration looks forward to continuing these conversations with leadership on both sides of the aisle.”
Earlier in the day, Trump said at a bipartisan meeting on tax reform that “we don’t want to forget DACA.”
“We want to see if we can do something with regard to immigration, with regard to the 800,000 people that are now — young people — they’re not children anymore. They were children, now they’re young people. But we want to see if we can do something in bipartisan fashion so that we can solve the DACA problem and other immigration problems. So we’ll be discussing that today,” Trump said.
Asked about skeptics of his new outreach to Democrats, the president replied, “Well, I’m a conservative, and I will tell you I’m not skeptical. And I think that, if we can do things in a bipartisan manner, that will be great. Now it might not work out, in which case we’ll try and do them without.”
“But I think, if we can do in a bipartisan manner — if you look at some of the greatest legislation ever passed, it was done on a bipartisan manner. And so that’s what — we’re going to give it a shot… we’ll see what we can do. And if it works out, great,” Trump said. “And if it doesn’t work out great, hopefully we’ll be able to do it anyway, as Republicans. OK?”
White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told CNN today that Trump is “now realizing is he wants to get things done.”
“This is a very results-oriented leader that we have elected and he wants to accomplish things and get things done. And I think he’s looking now at folks in Washington and asking, OK, who can help me do this? Who can help me accomplish the things I want to accomplish? Who can help me get parts of my agenda done?” Mulvaney explained. “And that’s who he is looking to work with. If it’s Republicans, that’s great. If it’s Democrats, that’s great, too. He wants to accomplish things because he thinks that’s what he’s elected for.”
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